radio cegeste 104.5FM

Jul 24, 2016

On July 24 I hosted a mini FM transmitter building workshop for ten people at The Anteroom, an non-profit artist run space based in an ex Masonic Lodge in Port Chalmers, run by the media artist Charlotte Parallel. The workshop was part of a series of D.I.Y creative technology and skill-sharing events Charlotte curated called BYO Battery.The workshop's intention was to make transmission technologies acessible, with participants constructing their own simple hand made ultra low watt transmitter with which to narrowcast their own sounds. Grounding this practical making within wider theoretical reflection and discussion of how DIY analogue technologies might inform our understanding of communications within the post-digital present, drawing on the histories of DIY radio making and free radio experiments in 1970s and 1980s Italian and Japanese media art and activist histories, we also discussed the use of transmission media for artistic and non-centralised cultural purposes. True to the spirit of the series, everyone also brought along their own 9v power source to the table.

Jul 14, 2016

On the 14th of July at 1pm I gave a performance/lecture at the National Library, Wellington, in response to Zombies on the Horizon, an exhibition drawing on archival collections to tell a lateral story of the development of experimental music in Aotearoa, put together by the National Library's music curator Matt Steindl for the Turnbull Gallery.

This exhibition takes its name from a statement by composer Douglas Lilburn, who begins the show's own narrative, talking about the coming of electronic media within music culture as "the zombie on the horizon". I also took this as my own lateral starting point, speculating how Lilburn's statement might be seen in relation or contrast to the notion of Zombie Media, recently elaborated by Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz, particularly in relation to an 'archival turn' within sound art cultures.

Apr 1, 2016

a brief post-midnight birthday-morning experiment / work-in-progress report. the first vaguely successful attempt at materialising something i've been wanting to make for quite a while now, which has the working title of 'marcasite radio' and is, essentially, a 1920s 'heirloom crystal set' (!) based around the speculation that the white iron pyrite that was used to make marcasite jewellery in the 1920s and 30s can act as the crystalline mineral in a crystal detector. and yes - when set into a 'hacked' crystal radio receiver of the same era, my maternal great grandmother's marcasite brooch becomes a diode that faintly speaks the voices of the aether.her name was ann wright (i'm named after her) and she was born in the 19th century, and was 101 when she died. (as of around an hour ago, i'm 59 years younger than that milestone). my mother gave me two pieces of her marcasite jewellery as a graduation present. it's a powerful thing to tune in to the material ghosts of my female ancestry today, to cast out into that space through the strange magic of radio, while also thinking back toward the work of this country's female radio pioneers in the first decades of the 20th century. that history, itself like a faint, crackling signal in the midst of static rain. a lot more work needed here, but a promising start, and an excellent way to celebrate the first few hours of being fairly old now, myself...

notes: a sound score is constructed from a Dunedin
street, using the location.

In its initial stages, this score is a textual
response to the idea of “land reclamation” and the fact that this street is on
a part of the earth that until recently was underwater. It progresses further
into the investigation of tidelines from various eras between the 1840s and
1890s, which inched forward as the settlers threw more and more stuff into the
harbour, including whole inconvenient parts of the landscape and later, the
built environment; both were treated as raw material for what we might identify
as, geologically speaking, an anthropocenic armature, a conglomerate
“archaeological” landmass that everyone could contribute to: geological cross
sections might reveal not just monumental or ‘natural’ things but strata of broken
tea cups, glass bottles, and garden wastage. The notion of the shoreline as a
liminal space, a fluxing zone of imaginative indeterminacy, was no doubt a
little buried in this process, to be replaced by a local footnote to a wider cultural
pragmatics of land usage. between
1846-1889 there are various sketches of a tideline. each line looks oddly
monolithic when frozen to a map, but taken together, the multiple tidelines
seem more accurate in their imaging of a fluxing boundary line. it is as though
the land is indecisive, shaking, re-drawing its boundaries, staggering into a solidity.
that the map is always provisional. that the attempt to provide a definitive
version is fraught with human hubris. tidelines will change again. with
development, with erosion, with climate change.

At this point the score reads:

wait until just after rain. then navigate the
street’s relocated tideline, paying particular attention to things not visible. do this as many times as needed, noting the changes.

Oct 25, 2015

"even as
strange geographies corrugate, fracture and smear worldly scale and
tempo, the ground isn’t somehow evaporated into virtual
information flux, but, quite to contrary, we are brought to the end
of the non-place, to a point where place can be and must be
re-established anew as an accountable habitat in the renewed image of
these very same deformations."

In creating the short study Edison ledges (diagram for twelve archival silences),various
archival sound recordings, in this case, commercially released
Edison wax cylinders c.1890-1920 catalogued within the 500+ cylinders
that form part of the collections of a small Hobart-based museum dedicated to sound technologies, the Sound Preservation
Association of Tasmania (S.P.A.T), were recorded, and the music subsequently
removed, leaving only the precursory audio, and the final run-out
grooves. Inverting the kinds of editing processes used, for example,
in digital archival sound preservation, in which an editor would
normally edit out these audible silences and use noise reduction
software to progressively remove the grain media to reveal the music,
here, the grain, the noise and the silence are all that remain of the
technical, epistemological and economic act of late 19th century audio recording.

Oct 18, 2015

Released just months before the 20th anniversary of the filmmaker's death, the quiet emergence of the re-release of the Tarkovsky tribute and/Oar initially put together in 2003 was aptly timed. Like a small expanded cinema exercise in itself, this package included a 20 page booklet and 3 CDs, two including compositions from the original release, and the last with contributions from seven new artists. I contributed a new track, 'for shoring up the past, as though with timber', and wrote an impressionistic essay for the liner notes, called 'there is only here and now, and light'. Full info on the release (where there are still copies left, at the time of writing) is available at and/Oar. Thanks so much to Dale Lloyd for his work and faith.

Feb 5, 2015

“As
traditional memory has vanished, we have felt called upon to
accumulate fragments, reports, documents, images, and speeches—any
tangible sign of what was—as if this expanding dossier might some
day be subpoenaed as evidence before who knows what tribunal of
history. The trace negates the sacred but retains its aura. We cannot
know in advance what should be remembered, hence we refrain from
destroying anything and put everything in archives instead.”-
Pierre
Nora,
Between Memory and History

“We
are not so much mourning our own inevitable loss, or the ego
reflected in that loss, as we are mourning the absence of the
connection. (…) A more tenable ecological conceptualisation of
mourning needs to consider connectivity, rather than unified
subjectivity, as a tool for exploring the deep channels of grief over
the loss of the more-than-human.”-
John C. Ryan, Why
Do Extinctions Matter?

“The
category of the fragmentary (…) is not to be confused with the
category of the contingent particularity; the fragment is that part
of the totality of the work that opposes totality.”-Theodor
Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory

Collected Huia Notations (like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded) is a workfor phonograph, solo piano, and extinct bird. It collates the four known Western musical notationsof the song of the Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris), an endemic New Zealand wattlebird of theancient family Callaeidae, which was driven to extinction in the last decades of the NineteenthCentury, partially through the attentions of overzealous wealthy Victorian Ornithologists andMuseum collectors.

Jan 10, 2015

notes toward a library of superlative trees. a transmission for Eucalyptus regnans was one of two works exhibited as part of a listening air. / They are that that talks of going at Constance ARI, Hobart, Tasmania, which opened on 10th January 2015, alongside works by Matt Warren and Alex Bishop-Thorpe. It was part of the offsite programme for the sound festival Mona Foma.

Dec 3, 2014

recordings of the silences of mounted specimens of the
extinct New Zealand bird Sceloglaux albifacies (the Whekau, or Laughing
Owl) are collected from public Natural History museums, via the
paranormal investigation method of EVP (electronic voice phenomenon),
which is associated with the use of radio and sound recording as a means
to contact the dead. the silences are layered into a one minute
transmission, collated on the centenary of the officially recognized
extinction of the species.

a blank time-capsule, “a one minute radio silence for Sceloglaux
albifacies” investigates cultural notions of death and memorialisation
in relation to the stability of recording mechanisms, the ‘eternal
stasis’ of the archive as storage, linking this to early colonial
collecting practices: the predatory accumulating of rare birds which
rationalised sacrificing the living animal in favour of the
‘immortality’ of the museum specimen. despite a few dozen of its corpses
being collected in such a way, along with a scant number of known
photographs, some drawings and written accounts, the living Whekau’s cry
was not recorded. accordingly, this project aims neither to represent,
nor to ‘speak for’ the bird in human terms, in favour of giving space to
its absence, listening in to the one hundred year lack of any signal
between 1914-2014.

[image: juvenile Sceloglaux albifacies photographed at its nest in a
cavity under a limestone boulder by Cuthbert and Oliver Parr. c.1909,
Raincliff Station, Opihi River, South Canterbury, New Zealand. This is the only image of this bird ever taken in the wild.]

Sep 28, 2014

a partial list of animal companions i had
as a child, age approx 4-12, in Oyster Cove, Tasmania, and East Gippsland,
Victoria. classification is of individual, recognizable animals or groups of
animals "collected" for close-observation of behaviour or life-cycle
in terrariums/aquariums, and/or lived with as deliberate "familiars"
in my immediate environment, rather than just observed in passing in the garden
/ in the wild. I have only included animals that weren’t ‘acquired’ via commercial
transaction, but approached personally, by collection (mostly temporary) and/or
re-visitation over days/months/seasons in the immediate environment they (and
I) lived in. Many of the individuals of these species were admired for their
beauty and/or emotionally connected with, some were regarded as being as close as (if not closer than) human friends, and some received full burials upon death.

Jul 23, 2014

notes for a coastline was a 2003 film directed by Zoe Roland,
for which I wrote an essayistic, poetic monologue, which was used as the
basis of the voiceover which sonically "anchored" the non-narrative
drift of the film.

the Dunedin Film Society asked to screen the film in their 2014 programme,
on the 23rd of July, as a local example of artist-filmmaking and a
short before Shirley Horrocks' documentary on the senior New Zealand
photographer Marti Friedlander, Marti: The Passionate Eye

the
film was finally digitised for the screening, and in dragging frames
out of it I was newly struck by all the small worlds that are buried
inside it, which emerged with their own beauty and texture.

these
images are all sourced from the exquisite 16mm camerawork Nigel Bunn shot for
the film, only one of its media. as individual frames rendered into
digital stasis, they paradoxically whisper of the fluid materiality of
celluloid. apart from the myriad filmic references one could mention,
some of the shots remind me of Vija Celmins' drawings, and some look
like early photography by Henry Fox Talbot, and some have the mystery of
a box of photographs or glass magic lantern slides newly discovered in the dusty corner of
an old antique store, their out-of-sequence timeline revealing a new
"treasure map" buried in their relation.

it
seems appropriate that they are re-shufflable in this new way as a
series of found photographs, as the last line I wrote in the script was
"and there is no real ending to this process, as the walking continues
after the viewing is finished. as listening continues...".

Jul 16, 2014

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger
than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house
is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good thing for
us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always
later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve
it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation
to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad
thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of
impermanence than in one of finality.

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something
closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value
as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same
tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to
our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near
poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry
that was lost.”
―
Gaston Bachelard,
The Poetics of Space

under the moth moniker, Jon Dale's occasional sonic missives have been collectively described by one commentator as an "incredibly haunting, rich dronescape." certainly, Jon is pretty much an honorary New Zealander when it comes to evoking the kinds of beautiful isolationism one might normally associate with an everyday familiarity with South Island landscapes, and one of the most assiduous and eloquent writers on that particular experimental idiom to be found anywhere.

staying for a week in Jon's apartment in Brunswick, Melbourne c.2011, resulted in this. we called it "at home" because that's where it was recorded; the small spaces of domestic life are very present in the piece. the fate of this apartment, now no longer Jon's home, and sadly since gentrified toward 21st century neo-liberal blandness, uncannily echoes that of the home I lived in at the time - the first place I'd called home in over five years, very much my childhood dream-house in Bachelardian vein, as well as the solid structural frame around history and memory which made the destabilisingly destructive anxieties of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake bearable. This was the 1903 mansion Threave in Dunedin, its bay window blurrily visible in the photo of the cover art here - a weight of air and light and listening also now lost to the expedient whims of "development."

So "at home" might be readable as something of a meditation on these spaces, and transience, small and impermanent comforts, stray signals, locality, finding space for listening, wandering thoughts only possible in silence, the remembered atmospheres of introverted, solitary rooms. in this regard, something about the piece reminds me of the final track on one under-appreciated masterpiece of the Dunedin home-recording aesthetic, Nigel Bunn's 1999 album Index, a seeming-afterthought to the song structures elsewhere on the album, called "this day at home." The track is a field recording of gently falling rain out the window of an old Dunedin warehouse, Nigel's home at the time; a capturing of one afternoon, a moment in a life - now also lost: the building has been demolished, its site turned into a carpark. But in the meditative, slow space within the sound of the recording, the building's memory, all the lives it once contained, seem still extant, endlessly circling in the aether.

for moth/cegeste, there is talk of a record. in the meantime, you can download "at home" for free from the bandcamp link above.

Jul 9, 2014

I was rather chuffed to find that Weirdo with a Dictaphone had recently bootlegged a recording of the duo performance I did with Joel Stern at Make It Up Club in mid-January, alongside this appropriately noisy photo and the somewhat startling comment: "An amazing, mystifying performance. Possibly one of the best MIUC shows I’ve ever seen."

This gig was a unique one for many reasons; significantly, Joel's playful interventions marked the first time i'd ever experimented with another live input signal going direct through my transmitter, at the same time as my own. The resulting homage to the misuse of the archive, theremins, morse code, a shared passion for the collecting of weirdo Library Music, Canary Training and Bird Identification records, and similar ephemera, can now be download for free from the link above, for your listening pleasure. It's great to be able to hear it....

Thanks again to Joel and Lloyd for making it possible, and to all the other erudite (and sometimes archival) ears...

Jul 5, 2014

On the 5th July 2014, I headed into Canterbury Museum to record the mounted specimen of the Laughing Owl/Whekau (Sceloglaux
albifacies) to be found, grouped humbly under the designation "forest birds", with various other New Zealand endemic species both extinct and still hanging on, in the Museum's extensive, old fashioned 'bird hall'. A sonic still life which was quietly significant, this 10 minute recording occurred on the 100th anniversary of the day (05.07.1914) the last officially acknowledged member of this species was found dead by the side of the road at Blue Cliffs station, not far from here in South Canterbury, by an 18 year old girl named Airini Woodhouse.

It seemed appropriate to commemorate this small, bleak anniversary, not mentioned in the New Zealand public media (unlike the 100th anniversary of the First World War, which has diverted much arts funding towards various memorial projects this year), with a private
mourning ritual, a memorial silence which mirrors the silence of the bird itself,
from Airini's sad discovery in 1914 onward, despite the rich prior
textuality of description which attends this bird's voice, the eerie "doleful
shrieks" and startling, unsettling, mad night forest laughter documented so frequently in the late 1800s, when the
Whekau was still found in South Island forest and plain. This took the form of recorded listening as a form of meditation, an inhabitation of a listening space, rather than merely a form of archiving, mixed in with a paranormal ritual investigation, via the practice of Electronic Voice Phenomenon - a nod to radio's long association with attempts to contact the dead.